Chapter 895 Tape

"Fuck..."

This is the first sentence David said to Xiangshan after he returned to the office in a daze.

The Engineering Research Center is now much emptier. After a few months, those who wanted to leave have left one after another. The team has shrunk a lot, and many project teams have been directly merged. Many technicians with military backgrounds have begun to fill the lowest-level vacancies. These technicians are not scholars and rarely do research work, but after a period of training, they are also enough to undertake the tasks that ordinary scientific researchers need to undertake.

And the scholars who stayed were automatically upgraded.

This is a major benefit for Xiangshan. Originally, with his age and qualifications, he could not get a position of this level. After he returns to China, he can directly obtain the level of assistant researcher and can directly wait for the evaluation of associate researcher. If he works here for a few years and makes some achievements, even this step can be skipped.

In the Republic, scholars who can get this title before the age of 30 can be called "promising".

But for Xiangshan, the biggest benefit of this "exceptional promotion" is that it is more convenient to study. Many materials that were not convenient to obtain before can now be directly read.

But even so, the information in his hands is still not as "timely" as David's.

Xiangshan remembered that these two days were when the Rama project disassembled the only complete alien machine. Obviously, it is impossible to put this kind of thing in a large auditorium and disassemble it in public. This is not realistic at all.

Although the process of disassembling this thing must be very ceremonial, not all scholars can see it at the first time. Xiangshan doesn't have this ability now.

Xiangshan can only take some of his researchers to continue to organize and study the information of the wreckage.

Xiangshan smiled at David and said, "What's wrong? Are there any amazing discoveries?"

David and Xiangshan's desks were originally very close. Now that a group of people have left, this research center has three desks per person. It is said that when there is free time. There will be partitions here to allow some scholars to get private office space. However, Xiangshan and David are the kind of friends who can talk to each other, so he just expanded his "territory" to pile up information and documents, but still sat in the original place.

"I should have thought of it earlier. Those guys..." David stared at Xiangshan, his eyes even bloodshot: "They don't use a damn scanner. They use tapes."

"What..." Xiangshan was stunned.

"Tapes." David repeated: "The little robots in Ogun don't need to worry about work efficiency at all, and the stored information doesn't need to be repeatedly erased. Those little robots don't use electronic scanners to identify signals... They are likely to temporarily magnetize the surface of the copper plates to directly convert the symbols into specific magnetic signals and burn them on the tape. Its memory is a tape drive."

Xiangshan was stunned: "But we didn't find any traces of tapes outside..."

"Radiation." David whispered: "Some polymer materials will deteriorate faster under the action of radiation. The mechanical debris outside the core area may have been there thousands or tens of thousands of years ago, and some The metal parts are all stuck together because of transmutation. These things are not afraid of radiation, but polymer materials do not have such strong radiation resistance. When we entered, the tapes in the wreckage outside, the tape base of the polymer film disappeared, and even the magnetic material particles were demagnetized. It's been too long. "

"But the machine in the core area is different. Its tape base is made of aluminum alloy. Although it has been stuck together and can't be separated, it can still be roughly seen what it is."

Xiangshan suddenly said: "Oh my God... In other words... Some mechanical structures with unknown meanings may be alien tape drives?"

In fact, even in the mid-21st century, earthlings are still using tapes.

On professional machines.

Tapes actually have a lower unit capacity cost than hard disks, higher stability, and lower requirements for storage environment, and can easily achieve long-term backup. In fact, with human current technology, the capacity of a special tape box has easily exceeded 500TB.

However, tapes are indeed inferior to disks. The modification and erasure of tapes are indeed far inferior to disks. It can only perform linear reading.

And now humans have indeed made professional machines that can hold hundreds of tapes at the same time.

"But from a structural point of view, those small robots can't hold a few tapes..." Xiangshan found it hard to accept: "Such a simple and rigid device can't support complex artificial intelligence... That's right..."

"It can be compensated by time." David said: "You know... what these guys lack the least is time."

One of the few disadvantages of tapes is "speed". Things written on tapes can only be read linearly.

If tapes are used to support an artificial intelligence, it may take a long time for it to react. The machine may need a long time to rewind in order to find the response measures preset for the current situation,

but the robots in Ogun have the most time.

"I guess the tape head works like this..." David picked up a roll of transparent tape with an auxiliary device and drew it on his desk. A line of tape was stuck on the desktop. David scratched his head: "That's probably what it means. There should be a device to take the tape back. That's what it means..."

Xiangshan took out a marker pen, wrote a few words on the table, then took the tape, drew it on the table, and then tore it off.

That line of words appeared on the tape.

"Like this?"

"Magnetize the area where a symbol is located, and use a magnetic tape to approach it... There may be some discrepancies in the specific details, but it is roughly the same principle." David said: "And in this process, the magnetic tape and the surface of the copper plate should not be in direct contact, and the distance may be a few tenths of a millimeter. Otherwise, we will detect a lot of friction marks on the semi-surface. Well, it is also possible that the magnetic head senses the electromagnetic signal, and then after the conversion of the purely mechanical structure, it is recorded on the tape."

Xiangshan held his head: "You are right... It takes a long time to record a symbol in this way... But what they lack the least is time."

Originally, in Xiangshan's impression, the black cabin of the Ogun core should be like a honeycomb, with countless machines quickly entering and exiting, working alternately, in an orderly manner, busy but not complicated.

But think about it carefully, what reason do these machines have to be busy?

They are facing a long journey of tens of thousands of years at least, and millions of years at most.

In the darkness, only a few magnetic heads are working slowly and firmly.

Note that in fact, the idea of ​​this recording medium has changed several times. I had imagined before that aliens made a large wall out of artificial diamonds with zigzag grooves on it, just like the grooves of a record. A metal "needle" would move between the grooves to read the information.

But then I gave up on this idea. The builders of Ogun could not predict the length of the journey, and naturally could not predict how many times the information would need to be read. Although diamond is the hardest substance, even diamond cannot withstand millions of years of reading.